The head of the peace delegation of the National Government, Vera Grabe, announced that one of the agreements reached in the fifth cycle of dialogues with the ELN is that that guerrilla committed to suspending “retention” or kidnapping actions.
After around three weeks of talks in the fifth cycle, which began with a crisis unleashed by the kidnapping by the Northern Front of the ELN of Luis Manuel Díaz, father of the soccer player Lucho Díaz, the parties reached six agreements, several of them key for the commitment to suspend extortionate kidnapping.
The second agreement reached, as stated in the joint statement, is “the suspension of withholdings for economic purposes, according to the ELN, within the framework of the extension of the Ceasefire scheduled for the end of January of next year.”
That is, both parties agreed to extend the bilateral and national ceasefire beyond January 29, 2024, when the first truce period signed between the Government and the guerrilla ends. The extension protocols will include, in that sense, the suspension of the kidnapping.
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“An announcement that I believe is transcendental for peace in Colombia, such as the ELN’s announcement to suspend what the ELN calls withholdings for economic purposes, the Government calls it differently, this linked to the extension of the ceasefire and a joint commitment of the ELN with the Government to provide information about people in captivity,” said the head of the delegation, Vera Grabe.
Pablo Beltrán, head of the ELN peace delegation, refrained from mentioning the agreement on withholdings in his statement at the closing of the fifth cycle. Instead, he noted that the ceasefire had presented problems of “interpretations” of concepts, which were clarified in the talks.
“We managed to unify terms to give life to the Monitoring and Verification Mechanism. With these measures that we have taken, that mechanism comes back to life. We have just ratified that we are going to extend this cessation, and the extension of the cessation, apart from the political intention, has to overcome the problems it has and this meeting really contributed to overcoming the problems that this cessation has, which makes the extension viable in February of next year,” said Beltrán.
In addition, he confirmed that the guerrilla will comply with what was agreed. “The ELN delegation present here has a mandate and a consensus and instructions from the entire leadership and our fronts and what has been stated here is because the ELN is going to comply with it. What the ELN is not going to comply with, it does not sign,” he pointed out.
Another of the agreed points is the “creation of economic and financial conditions for the materialization of the Mexico Agreement.” Although the scope of that agreement was not extended, the ELN delegation had put on the table the need to address the support components in the face of the suspension of illicit activities with which the guerrilla sustains itself.
Likewise, the parties agreed to extend and deepen the design phase of the participation process, which is part of the fulfillment of the first point of the dialogue agenda.
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